It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly at these records;but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I merely wished him good evening,and passed into the common room at the end of the passage,where there was a bright large kitchen fire, and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr.Wopsle and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.
He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was all on one side,and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were taking aim at something with an invisible gun.He had a pipe in his mouth, and he took it out, and,after slowly blowing all his smoke away and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded,and then he nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit down there.
But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of resort, I said “No, thank you,sir,” and fell into the space Joe made for me on the opposite settle. The strange man,after glancing at Joe, and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged,nodded to me again when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, as it struck me.
“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a blacksmith.”
“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.
“What’ll you drink, Mr.—?You didn’t mention your name, by the bye.”
Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll you drink, Mr. Gargery?At my expense?To top up with?”
“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth,I ain’t much in the habit of drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”
“Habit?No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a Saturday night too. Come!Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”
“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”
“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a sentiment.”
“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.
“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses round!”
“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at church.”
“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The lonely church,right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”
“That’s it,” said Joe.
The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe,put his legs up on the settle that he had to himself.He wore a flapping broad-brimmed traveller’s hat,and under it a handkerchief tied over his head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair.As he looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a half-laugh, come into his face.
“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen,but it seems a solitary country towards the river.”
“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.
“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or vagrants of any sort, out there?”
“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t find _them_, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”
Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented; but not warmly.
“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.
“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand; we went out as lookers on;me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?”
“Yes, Joe.”
The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye,as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said,“He’s a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”
“Pip,” said Joe.
“Christened Pip?”
“No, not christened Pip.”
“Surname Pip?”
“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a infant, and is called by.”
“Son of yours?”
“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course,that it could be in anywise necessary to consider about it,but because it was the way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over pipes, —“well—no. No, he ain’t.”
“Nevvy?” said the strange man.
“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he is not—no,not to deceive you, he is _not_—my nevvy.”
“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man might not marry;and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr.Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third,and seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he added, “—as the poet says.”
And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me,he considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into my eyes.I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to patronise me.
All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me,and looked at me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me down.But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.
It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was pointedly addressed to me.He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me, and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me.And he stirred it and he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but _with a file_.
He did this so that nobody but I saw the file;and when he had done it he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket.I knew it to be Joe’s file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument.I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his settle,taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about turnips.
There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause before going on in life afresh,in our village on Saturday nights, which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays than at other times.The half-hour and the rum and water running out together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.
“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man.“I think I’ve got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy shall have it.”
He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind!Your own.”
I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners, and holding tight to Joe.He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle good-night (who went out with us),and he gave me only a look with his aiming eye,—no, not a look, for he shut it up,but wonders may be done with an eye by hiding it.
On the way home, if I had been in a humour for talking, the talk must have been all on my side,for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of the Jolly Bargemen,and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide open,to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible.But I was in a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in the kitchen,and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell her about the bright shilling.“A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy!Let’s look at it.”
I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”
Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in the county.Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly Bargemen to restore them to their owner.While he was gone, I sat down on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister,feeling pretty sure that the man would not be there.
Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he, Joe,had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper,and put them under some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in the state parlour.There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many a night and day.
I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed,through thinking of the strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun,and of the guiltily coarse and common thing it was,to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts,—a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too.A dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear.I coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday;and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I screamed myself awake.
Chapter XI.
At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s,and my hesitating ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me,as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage where her candle stood.She took no notice of me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder,superciliously saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another part of the house.
The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square basement of the Manor House.We traversed but one side of the square, however, and at the end of it she stopped,and put her candle down and opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared,and I found myself in a small paved courtyard,the opposite side of which was formed by a detached dwelling-house,that looked as if it had once belonged to the manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery.There was a clock in the outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room,and like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a low ceiling,on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in the room,and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind, looking out.
It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the neglected garden,upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree that had been clipped round long ago,like a pudding, and had a new growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different colour,as if that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This was my homely thought,as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been some light snow, overnight,and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge; but,it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden,and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window, as if it pelted me for coming there.
I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room,and that its other occupants were looking at me.I could see nothing of the room except the shining of the fire in the window-glass,but I stiffened in all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.
There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman.Before I had been standing at the window five minutes,they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs,but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs:because the admission that he or she did know it,would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure,and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to repress a yawn. This lady,whose name was Camilla, very much reminded me of my sister, with the difference that she was older,and (as I found when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features. Indeed,when I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had any features at all,so very blank and high was the dead wall of her face.
“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”
“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said the gentleman; “far more natural.”
“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbour.”
“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own neighbour, who is?”
Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn), “The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good idea too. The other lady,who had not spoken yet, said gravely and emphatically, “_Very_ true!”
“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange!Would anyone believe that when Tom’s wife died,he actually could not be induced to see the importance of the children’s having the deepest of trimmings to their mourning?‘Good Lord!’ says he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so long as the poor bereaved little things are in black?’ So like Matthew!The idea!”
“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond;“Heaven forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never will have, any sense of the proprieties.”
“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,—“I was obliged to be firm. I said, ‘It WILL NOT DO,for the credit of the family.’ I told him that, without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced.I cried about it from breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion.And at last he flung out in his violent way, and said, with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly went out in a pouring rain and bought the things. ”
“_He_ paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.
“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned Camilla. “_I_ bought them.And I shall often think of that with peace, when I wake up in the night.”
The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or call along the passage by which I had come,interrupted the conversation and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out,I heard Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure!What next!” and Camilla add, with indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy!The i-d_e_-a!”
As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped all of a sudden, and,facing round, said in her taunting manner, with her face quite close to mine,—
“Well?”
“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.
She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.
“Am I pretty?”
“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”
“Am I insulting?”
“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.
“Not so much so?”
“No.”
She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such force as she had, when I answered it.
“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?”
“I shall not tell you.”
“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”
“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”
“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”
“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose,as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her then,and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.
We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going up,we met a gentleman groping his way down.
“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.
“A boy,” said Estella.
He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an exceedingly large head,and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the light of the candle.He was prematurely bald on the top of his head,and had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling.His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and suspicious.He had a large watch-chain, and strong black dots where his beard and whiskers would have been if he had let them.He was nothing to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be anything to me,but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing him well.
“Boy of the neighbourhood?Hey?” said he.
“Yes, sir,” said I.
“How do _you_ come here?”
“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.
“Well!Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you’re a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”
With those words, he released me—which I was glad of,for his hand smelt of scented soap—and went his way downstairs.I wondered whether he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor,or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner.There was not much time to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room,where she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me standing near the door,and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her eyes upon me from the dressing-table.
“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have worn away, have they?”
“Yes, ma’am. To-day is—”
“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I don’t want to know. Are you ready to play?”
I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”
“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.
“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”
“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham, impatiently,“and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”
I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.
“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”
I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that room, too,the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive.A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate,and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up,and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air,—like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber;or it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious,and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould,and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it,as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth;it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and,as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow,like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it,and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels,as if the same occurrence were important to their interests.But the black beetles took no notice of the agitation,and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way,as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another.
These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching them from a distance,when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned,and she looked like the Witch of the place.
“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick,“is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and die at once,the complete realisation of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”
“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”
“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”
She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!Walk me, walk me!”
I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss Havisham round and round the room.Accordingly, I started at once, and she leaned upon my shoulder,and we went away at a pace that might have been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-cart.
She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!” Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went,she twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth,and led me to believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion.When her light appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham,and we started away again round and round the room.
If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings,I should have felt sufficiently discontented;but as she brought with her the three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below,I didn’t know what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped;but Miss Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,—with a shame-faced consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.
“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”
“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”
Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she murmured,as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear soul!Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”
“And how are _you_?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to Camilla then,I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on,and I felt that I was highly obnoxious to Camilla.
“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be expected.”
“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding sharpness.
“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a display of my feelings,but I have habitually thought of you more in the night than I am quite equal to.”
“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.
“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a hitch came into her upper lip,and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings and nervous jerkings,however, are nothing new to me when I think with anxiety of those I love.If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I wish it could be so.But as to not thinking of you in the night—The idea!” Here, a burst of tears.
The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and him I understood to be Mr.Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice,“Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other. ”
“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once,“that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my dear.”
Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated old woman,with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells,and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”
“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.
“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.
“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true!It’s a weakness to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it.No doubt my health would be much better if it was otherwise,still I wouldn’t change my disposition if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering,but it’s a consolation to know I possess it, when I wake up in the night. ” Here another burst of feeling.
Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going round and round the room;now brushing against the skirts of the visitors,now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.
“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties, never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is!I have taken to the sofa with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible,with my head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where—”
(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)
“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours,on account of Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”
“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.
“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious personage),“the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to thank you, my love?”
“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed Camilla,“I have remained in that state, hours and hours,and Raymond is a witness of the extent to which I have choked,and what the total inefficacy of ginger has been,and I have been heard at the piano-forte tuner’s across the street,where the poor mistaken children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,—and now to be told—” Here Camilla put her hand to her throat,and began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new combinations there.
When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and herself,and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.
“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly, “when I am laid on that table.That will be his place,—there,” striking the table with her stick, “at my head!And yours will be there!And your husband’s there!And Sarah Pocket’s there!And Georgiana’s there!Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me. And now go!”
At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.
“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply and depart.It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and duty for even so short a time.I shall think of it with a melancholy satisfaction when I wake up in the night.I wish Matthew could have that comfort, but he sets it at defiance.I am determined not to make a display of my feelings,but it’s very hard to be told one wants to feast on one’s relations,—as if one was a Giant, —and to be told to go. The bare idea!”
Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving bosom,that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of view,and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth.Sarah Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last;but Sarah was too knowing to be outdone,and ambled round Georgiana with that artful slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence.Sarah Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.
While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked with her hand on my shoulder,but more and more slowly. At last she stopped before the fire, and said,after muttering and looking at it some seconds,—
“This is my birthday, Pip.”
I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.
“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here just now,or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they dare not refer to it.”
Of course _I_ made no further effort to refer to it.
“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table, but not touching it,“was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it,and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”
She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking at the table;she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white cloth all yellow and withered;everything around in a state to crumble under a touch.